I must have been snoozing these last dozen or so years as a battle raged on campuses and in certain publications and in online venues about the value of being honest.

Maureen Dowd, in her Sunday column in The New York Times, traces the fight that pits nasty versus nice.

Seems it goes all the way back to 2000, when someone I never heard of encouraged a group of students not to be critics in the same vein as the hold saying, if you can't say anything nice don't say anything at all.

Apparently, this camp has grown and, according to Dowd, threatens to stifle the nastiness that makes life online and even offline so, well, exciting.

Since I am unfamiliar with these folks, and they have yet to make any inroads in any of the places I regularly visit, I kind of liken them in my mind to those people who believe that it's important for all children to make A's or at least make the first team, the people who worry about damaging the precious egos of others.